A Journey to Becoming a Critical Design Ethnographer

Activity

The inspiration for this game started back when I was a senior in high school and was flying out from Virginia to visit ASU. Having lived in Virginia I was use to seeing green everywhere but I was not expecting this to continue once I got to Arizona. I assumed it would be very brown. Needless to say I was wrong and a good portion of the houses I saw had grass lawns and lots of trees. As the weeklong visit progressed I was driven all over the valley and as this was taking place I noticed a lot of golf courses. This was the main thing that really bothered me. I was also influenced by my time spent at the center for games and impact over that visit. Where I was introduced for the first time, to the game spent, which I would later base my game off of.
The next pieces of motivation came from spending my summer in northern California, where the drought was in full swing. Being around the panic of not having water. Hearing about how there might need to be a pipe put over the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge (again) to get water to Marin county really put me in the water conservation mind set as I went into college. My final inspiration was my CSE 205 class. We had just learned how to use graphical user interface in java and I was eager to put this toward something used full. So the game was designed to be a web application.
My game’s idea came to me when we were forced to make a blog post about what we were making our games about. When I could not think of something to post about my group members stepped in and help by asking me what bothered me in the world. I responded with golf courses in the desert. Our group’s theme was empathy, so I thought about games that made me feel empathy. The one I immediately came to was Spent. So, my game idea was made; I would be making a game about water conservation based off of spent.